VIII International Summer School on Higher Education Research “Theoretical and Conceptual Perspectives in Higher Education Research”

3 June, 2021 13:00 UTC

Prof. Jussi Välimaa

The webinar will focus on the beginning of the universities and reflect on the continuities from the Middle Ages to contemporary universities. Professor Välimaa will also discuss the main periods of transition of universities including the changing roles of universities in the development of nation states and religious wars (16th to 17the century), Napoleonic wars and the emergence of ideal models of Napoleonic and Humboldtian university ideals. He will also discuss the core values of Humboldtian universities: institutional autonomy, freedom to study and freedom to research. Professor Välimaa also discusses the international influence of the Humboldtian university ideal and the expansion of higher education during the 20th century.

Questions for discussion:

1. Are the core principles of medieval universities continuously alive in contemporary universities?
2. Why European universities have become the dominant model for contemporary universities?
3. What the core values of universities and research?
4. What would be an ideal relationship between universities and societies?

4 June, 2021 13:00 UTC

Prof. Gaële Goastellec

While research in sociology has largely questioned the influence of social, economic cultural capital on education, how citizenship articulates with access to higher education and, conversely, how higher education impinges on access to citizenship has been little discussed. Focusing on the concept of citizenship and its historical transformation, this session contributes to the discussion of conceptual lenses for the inquiry into international education, international and refugee students and understanding inequalities of access to higher education in different settings. Professor Goastellec will briefly present historical and contemporary elements of the construction of citizenship and discuss the impact of this relationship on student’s circulations over time to access higher education. For example, how women built their access to HE by studying abroad at the end of the 19th century; how migration opportunities are partly ruled by the degrees hold; or how refugees’ access to HE is embedded in the type of staying permit allocated. A second part of the seminar will engage students to discuss these mechanisms by proposing examples based on their research or higher education experience. 

Questions for discussion:

1. Which examples can you think off that would illustrate the relationship between citizenship and access to higher education?
2. Which underlying social dynamics do these examples allow to grasp with regard the construction of access to HE (e.g. interdependencies between national rules; imbrication of various types of policies beyond higher education, etc.)
3. With which consequences on the (re)production of inequalities in access to higher education?

11 June, 2021 13:00 UTC

Prof. Simon Marginson

Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledge flows and collegial collaboration and has partial autonomy. Four different interpretive frameworks (narratives) have evolved to explain the dynamics of global science: science as an open and expanding cross-border network; science as an arms race between competing nations; science as a global market of competing institutions or ‘World-Class Universities’; and science as a centre-periphery hierarchy in which emerging countries are permanently constrained by Euro-American dominance. Prof. Marginson reviews each narrative in relation to the literature, especially studies in scientometrics, and in relation to empirical tendencies in global science, tracked in secondary data derived from bibliometric collections. While each narrative contains at least a grain of truth, each also conflicts with the others and each is radically insufficient. A better explanation of the drivers of global science combines (1) flat open networked relations with (2) the inequalities and closures shaped by global hegemony, arbitrarily modified by (3) national governments and specific resources. 

Questions for discussion:  

1. What are the main changes that have occurred in global science since the advent of the Internet at the beginning of the 1990s?
2. Is global networking and publishing in science primarily driven by nation-state competition (the ‘innovation arms race’) or is there more to it?
3. What are the main weaknesses in the centre-periphery model of global science, as a description of the real dynamics of science?
4. Why are the social sciences and humanities largely outside the main global bibliometric data bases on research (Web of Science and Scopus)?
5. Is Russia’s relatively modest performance as a science country (as measured by paper outputs and high citation science) the result of being a non-English speaking country or are there other factors at work?
6. How can a more inclusive approach to world-wide knowledge be developed? By what means?

June 18, 2021 13:00 UTC

Prof. Pedro Nuno Teixeira

In recent decades higher education has increasingly been approached from an economic perspective that has emphasized the importance of higher education given its contribution to individual and social wealth and well-being. This was strongly supported by the development of human capital theory, though the economic discourse about higher education goes beyond that. Whereas earlier research has emphasized individual and pecuniary benefits, especially those observed in the labour market (through greater employability and higher income), more recent research has devoted greater attention to the so-called benefits of higher education and its contribution to individual and social well-being.

Questions for discussion:

1. What are the main economic benefits of higher education and how much have these sustained the expansion of HE?
2. How much inequality there is in the distribution of the benefits of HE?
3. What are the social benefits of HE and what is the empirical evidence available to support them?